A recent report issued by the Institute of Medicine – titled “Best Care at Lower Cost” – calls for a dramatic transformation in health care delivery, saying “America’s health care system has become far too complex and costly to continue business as usual.” Its first recommendation (“The Digital Infrastructure”) focuses on the importance of health information systems and highlights a crucial aspect of their development that is too often overlooked – the issue of interoperability. Will the individual systems that are created be able to work together efficiently?
It’s an enormously important issue for health care broadly, and it will determine how effective those systems can be on a national level. At present, health care providers across the country are creating or enhancing their health information systems. In some cases, like ours at Intermountain Healthcare, those systems have a long history; we began instituting electronic medical records 40 years ago. Others are early in the journey. But all are being developed essentially for their own internal needs. Interoperability is low on the priority list.
Five health care providers who have been in the forefront of using electronic medical records have been collaborating on the creation of a Care Connectivity Consortium to pioneer the effective connectivity of electronic patient information across their systems. Those five are Intermountain Healthcare (based in Utah), Geisinger Health System (Pennsylvania), Group Health Cooperative (Washington), Kaiser Permanente (California), and Mayo Clinic (Minnesota). But even that ground-breaking effort, in which I’m heavily involved, will result in a multi-provider network, not a national one.
